rosary

Persephone Knows Her Work

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / Leave a comment

This is the second of my three posts for Way of the Rose for this novena, the walk through the Sorrowful Mysteries, which I call: The Agony in the Garden, The House of Pain, the Village of Shaming, the Grove of Shadows, and the Gates of Life and Death:

In her book Lost Goddesses of Ancient Greece: A Collection of Pre-Hellenic Myths, Colleen Spretnak tells an older version of the Persephone story, one before the northern Zeus worshippers swept south into Greece, before it became a story of abduction and assault, This earlier telling gives the young Persephone (the Kore maiden) agency. Demeter, goddess of the Earth and all things living, is responsible, too, for Death. Her intuitive daughter feels the lost souls of the dead surrounding them, seeking solace, but Demeter knows that her own work is to instruct the mortals to store seed in the Earth that the dead may fertilize the seeds for new growth, and that to do more for the dead will keep her from her other important work. Essentially, she tells her daughter, “tending to the solace of the dead is not my job.”

In this story, Persephone knows in her bones that this will be her work, to tend to the wandering souls of the dead, to offer them comfort and belonging. Although Demeter tries to forbid her, Persephone knows her work, and enters a crevice in the Earth to go deep into the Underworld to care for the souls of the dead. I can see her, full of curiosity, full of adventure, full of the knowledge of her purpose, entering the crevice, traveling the winding passageways to the underworld, perhaps following the Torch-bearer Hecate, Finder of Ways, Keeper of the Keys.

Today we overlay the Sorrowful Mysteries on this Mystery of the Scourging (the House of Pain), and I listen not only for the purposeful footfall of the young woman who takes her destiny upon herself, but for the wild keening of the mother, lost in her own shadowy labyrinth of grieving. And I watch my own children embark on their young adulthood, and I wonder if I am strong enough to let them go on their own underworld journeys, to seek their purpose away from me and my influence. Of course I want them to find their own way, to succeed, to be their own people, but the letting go demands that I grieve, too, like Demeter. And it is a comfort to know that Persephone (who is known as both death-bringer and light-bringer) is single-minded, purposeful in her pursuit of her life’s work. I know that when eventually she brings death for me and my beloveds, she will come trailing light, with an invitation to adventure.

Practice (this is a version of my Heart’s Desire Prayer for this novena). I have assigned each of the five stages of this journey to an animal or bird that has made itself known to me in recent weeks. You can, of course, choose your own:

Lady, take me Deep,
Let me tumble through the cave-mouth
into your realm of shadow and transformation.

Follow Kore into the cave, seeking the Land of the Dead (I see her as a young deer)
I enter the cavern in wonder,
full of curiosity, full of adventure.

Follow Demeter, Queen of the Earth and her harvests, on her search for her disappeared child (mother raven)
I listen for the flutter of my longings,
for the distant song of my deepest desire.

Follow Hecate, Torchbearer, Way-Finder, Keeper of the Keys, through the labyrinthine caverns (grandmother owl)
I step onto the winding pathway,
holding my torch and my keys.

Enter the Realm of the Dead, the Circle of Ancestors (I think of serpents)
I sit in the firelit circle of Ancestors,
and receive their Sapient Council.

Receive the blessing of Persephone, Queen of the Dead (I see a crocodile)
I follow the Bringer of Death, Bringer of Light
with open heart, quiet mind, dancing feet, and willing hands.

Blessed Be.

Finding Meaning in Paradox

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / Leave a comment

My online Rosary Group, The Way of the Rose, is currently contemplating the Sorrowful Mystery of the Scourging, which I call The House of Pain, for our 54-day novena, which will take us to Solstice. Today was my turn to meditate on the Joyful Mysteries in this context:

The rosary unsettles me, jars me, and shakes me up. Even as it provides a thread to follow, consistently, carefully, into the narrative of my life, like Ariadne’s Red Thread that guides the seeker through the labyrinth, step by step, bead by bead, it leads me into Rooms of Mystery where I am not always sure I am prepared to go. I balk in the doorways.

Joyful Mysteries? How can I dare to enter those rooms when children are still dying in Gaza, when innocent, hard-working people are being abducted from our streets by masked men, when a friend dies of cancer? And yet I walk into the room of the Garden of Yes, and then I Visit the House of my Beloved, and on into the following rooms, and I learn something about joy, how joy is woven into the cloth of my rages and sorrows and fears, how choosing joy is truly an act of resistance in the face of death-dealing and war-mongering, greed and tyranny.

And Sorrow? How can I enter those rooms again, feel the dread of a dead-weight in the pit of my stomach, to relive the traumas I hold in my bones? Yet each time I walk through the caverns of sorrow, I am healed yet again, brought through to the rooms of Glory, the resurrecting, the re-awakening, the re-imagining of life on the other side.

And here, in these days, we have the extra layer of unease, discomfiture and disorientation, walking through the rooms of the Joyous Mysteries even as we meditate on the Scourging, on the pain. It can feel like a cracking and dissolving of the psyche, stepping into two rooms at once, yet the work of Joy as Resistance, the holding of Sorrow even as I allow Joy to infuse my spirit, is not a brokenness and a fracturing, but a healing of the disparate pieces of my psyche, allowing me to be more fully human. There is teaching in this paradox, a chance to learn to live in the liminal spaces, in the betweens, where the possibilities merge and mingle.

In this novena, we sit in the House of Pain (my phrase for the mystery of the Scourging), yet even in this place is a joyful Garden of Yes, a House of my Beloved, a village of my Birth, a place of Blessing by the elders, and a Finding my feet on the temple floor. Finding joy in moments of pain is not toxic positivity, a refusal to experience the pain. Instead, it’s an acknowledgement of the complexity of life, not just that we go through cycles of joy and pain and resurrection, but that these cycles are overlaid upon each other, that our humanity equips us to live with such complexity.

I rework my Hail Marys each novena to reflect my heart’s desire prayer, each decade a slightly different version of the prayer. During this novena, one of my prayers is to Persephone: “Holy Persephone, help me to reclaim and heal and integrate the pieces of myself within your cycles of transformation.”

May we reclaim, heal, and integrate our lamenting and our celebrating selves, our longing and our satisfied selves, our despairing and our hopeful selves, as we walk through these caverns and rooms into the Solstice.

Practice: Sit quietly and settle into your breath. Feel your roots anchoring you to Mother Earth. In your mind’s eye, follow the torch-bearer through the twisting underground passages to a wooden doorway. You know this door. You have entered it before, the door to the House of Pain. Take a good deep breath, knowing that when you enter, you will only need to face the pain you are ready to face, knowing that you carry within you the mysteries of joy. Picture Joy as a shining stone you carry in your hand. Feel its weight and its heft. The torch-bearer hands you the keys and you open the door. Keep breathing deeply as you enter, and straighten your shoulders. Speak to yourself: I am resilient and strong. I have the tools within me to face the pain. Find rest within yourself here. Listen for the messages the pain has to tell you, even as you hold fiercely to joy. Stay only as long as you feel able. Breathe. Square your shoulders. Walk into the new day.

What’s Your Little Thing?

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / Leave a comment

Near the top of my list of People to Emulate is Wangari Maathai, the biologist and environmental and women’s rights activist who started the Green Belt Movement in Kenya in 1977 to build communities–particularly among women–that would work together to address erosion and to plant trees. Over time, the GBM began to advocate with the Kenyan government for more democratic leadership, for the release of political prisoners, and for an end to land grabs that were destroying Kenya’s rich ecological systems.

“It’s the little things citizens do. That’s what will make the difference. My little thing is planting trees,” she said. And that little thing turned into a big thing, a major project of change and conservation and stability for human rights in Kenya. It didn’t end the struggles. But it has made, and continues to make (years after her death), positive and sustainable change for good.

If you live in the United States in these days of national instability and cruelty, what is your little thing? What is the thing you will do to hold back the tides of cruelty? Can you find a local refugee family and be a friend and guide, someone to help them feel safe? Can you print out Red Cards–Know Your Rights Cards–and pass them out to people in your communities? Can you write letters to the editor? Call your reps? Make art that challenges the cruelty? Go to protests? Make signs for protests? Boost the signal on your social media? Join a local group that is organizing to create safe spaces? Speak up in a school board meeting? Run for office? Can you pray?

That last one, though. Some people say prayer changes things. Other people say it’s a way to get out of doing anything “real.” I pray believing that at the very least, prayer changes me. These days, in my rosary prayers, I am calling on Our Lady of Guadalupe, who is also Tonantzin, and to Ix Chel, who was the Lady long ago in regions of Central America, and to Hekate of ancient Greece who guided wanderers through the darkness. I imagine I am praying with the captives who were shipped to that mega-prison in El Salvador without due process, with the mothers and children (at least one who is in desperate need of medical treatment) who were deported to Honduras, with the university students who are experiencing the cruelty of US prisons as they wait to be released or deported. I know the Lady hears me, hears us, and I feel Her working on me, giving me confidence and courage, nudging me to act and to love more deeply. The prayer is changing me.

The Contrarian journalist Jennifer Rubin calls this administration’s barrage of destruction the “cruelty train.”

How do we stop a cruelty train? Not by sending our own cruel train after it. But by turning all our little things into sand that clogs the gears, into wrenches that break the cogs–our prayers, our signs,
our public songs, our letters, our calls, our knowledge, our commitment to democracy, to due process, to checks and balances, to separation of church and state, to the Constitution, to basic human rights, to the power of Love.

What will be your little thing? Small person that I am, I cannot stop the cruelty train simply by standing in its way with my little thing, or praying that it will derail. But together, all our little things–all our prayers, all our will, our shouting, our fierce Love–become a barrier that just might stop the train. Perhaps Wangari Maathai didn’t know that helping women to plant trees would build into a movement that would slow the train of ecological destruction in East Africa, or perhaps she guessed, but her movement is doing so.

Blessed be.

Here are some little things to try:
1. Make a list of your own People to Emulate. What got them moving? How did they step into their sense of their ability to change the world?
2. Pray. Daily. Or if prayer is not your thing, make a mantra of Courage and Confidence that you can say every day to build you up for the tasks ahead. Be ready for it to change you.
3. Make art and poetry and songs. Sing and dance.
4. Laugh together with others. Joy is Resistance. Laughter–real, deep, heartfelt, soulful laughter–frightens fascists.
5. Join a group or two–get the emails from Indivisible (your local groups), or 50501, or other local initiatives that are dedicated to science and human rights and safety for immigrants and refugees and brave spaces for trans and other LGBTQ people.
6. Call your reps. Start with once a week, if you’re anxious. Pat yourself on the back when you make the calls. Take a deep breath, and get ready to make more calls the next week, or the next day.
7. Write letters to the editors. Write op-eds.
8. Join a rally, or convene your own. Get out in the streets with signs and make some noise.
9. Love your neighbor.
10. Stay curious, even in the midst of your rage. Perhaps that aunt who repeats your uncle’s MAGA talking points is really beginning to wonder whether she’s on the wrong side. Ask her what she believes, believe in her goodness, be curious about her. Remind her that she can change her mind when she learns new information.

Mysteries of the Dark

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / Leave a comment

Today is the last of my three days of posting reflections on the Mysteries of the Dark Novena for Way of the Rose. Here are my thoughts:

Mysteries of the Darkness Novena

Day 41. Sorrowful Mysteries:

Walking in the Dark.

I have always felt compelled towards shadow work, looking deeply within, trying to understand my impulses and compulsions, my vices and my rages, the way desire flows and obsession grows.

Mystery, mysticism, paradox, counterpoint, magic, surrealism—that which is beyond the ken of daylight sight. Like the way you have to look to the side of the Pleiades to see them clearly.

When I was a teenager, if I was the last person downstairs at night, I used to hate those seconds after I had turned off the light before I got to the top of the stairs. The darkness behind me was too overwhelming. But today, when I get up in the night, I like to find my way through the dark house by feel, sensing where I am in the room, honing my dark-sight.

Even so, I struggle with the encroaching darkness of the last few weeks before the Winter Solstice. I just can’t make my peace. My energy flags with the dying day, and my brain gets dull and fuzzy. In a season when grades need to be updated for students and Thanksgiving plans made, and then Christmas and Yule, I want to emulate the bears, go underground, feel the quiet rhythms, be still and silent. And so instead I groan when the day dies early, when the light has left like the wild geese for the south.

I need to keep giving myself pockets of intentional retreat, hours here and there where I step out of the bustle to write and reflect, to say the rosary slowly—savoring every word instead of the daily push to make sure it gets done in the schedule, walk or bike on the woods trail, stand under the stars. It’s a form of self-care—spiritual self-care. Not down-time for down-time’s sake (though that is absolutely essential to my mental health), but unlike other forms of self-care in which the intent is to disconnect, the intent here is to re-connect to something beyond myself. Dark-time self-care is about keeping an intentional inner focus amid the outer distractions.

How do you do spiritual self-care in tumultuous times?

The Heart’s Desire Prayer I have been praying during this novena is:

Oh Antlered One who calls me home to live within the garden of myself,
help me to find the still point in the maelstrom of my anxious fears,
to follow where the sacred tug of grief and rages
will guide me to the wisdom I will write upon the pages
of these my croning years.

In a Garden

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / Leave a comment

This is the second of three pieces of writing on the rosary, which I am doing this week for The Way of the Rose Dark Mysteries Novena. Today is the Joyful Mysteries.

Mysteries of the Darkness Novena
Day 40. Joyful Mysteries:

Everything seems to begin in a garden.

In the traditional narrative of the Mysteries, both Sorrow and Glory begin in gardens. I imagine the Garden of Sorrows to be an arboretum of sorts, with lined pathways and small groves of trees covering the hillside. And in my imagination the Garden of Resurrection—perhaps its my childhood experience of Easter and its daffodils and amaryllis and sprays of flowering tree branches—is filled with flowers. And I have chosen to place the first step in the Joyful Mysteries, the moment of contact between maiden and angel, in a garden, a Garden of Yes, a place where I, the one about to embark on the journey, get to choose whether I will accept the tasks ahead of me. Because to do inner work, to make my spiritual practices live beyond the mere rote doing and saying of them, is to consent to the constant journey of transformation.

A garden is a space somewhere between wilderness and domesticity, with even the most carefully pruned and shaped garden remaining ungovernable at some level. I like the wilder looking ones, where there is evidence of human interaction with the wild, but the plants also seem to be offering their opinion on how the space should be.

My heart, too, is a garden, a space between the wildlands and the tame, where emotions and dreams grow not entirely wild. I tend them, shape them, and honor their presence, but I do not bully them or subjugate them, at least when I am at my most open-hearted. And they have a say in what my garden becomes.

And these myths and stories of Mystery which we use to anchor the decades of our daily practice are also gardens. As we individually take up the care of them, each one’s garden will look different. Each telling is transformed a little, as when the light hits in just a certain way in a mostly shaded corner of a garden.

In the Joyful Mysteries, whether you call it the Annunciation or Yes or The Budding, we begin again, fresh in the knowledge that while we cannot choose the circumstances of our lives, we do get to consent to the tasks we take upon us for the journey.

I enter the garden. There is a shining light, or a purple shadow against the grass, or a little bird, or a sound of bells, and a Question: Will you take this journey? Will you let it transform you, knowing there will be wonders ahead and discoveries to make, sorrows aplenty, and enlightenment on the other side?

Glorious Mysteries

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / 2 Comments

For the next three days, I am writing the posts for the 54-Day Mysteries of the Dark Novena at Way of the Rose. I’ll post those here on the blog, and do separate posts for the daily November poems.

Mysteries of the Darkness Novena

Day 39. Glorious Mysteries:

Oh how the rhythm of these three days keeps me grounded, knowing there is within the Joyful Mysteries the shadow of Sorrows to come, and within the Sorrows, the seed of Glory waiting.

Sometimes it drives me a little crazy, if I am to be honest. Today I want to wallow in the Sorrows, rage and cry, feel all the Big and Overwhelming Feelings. And sometimes during the Sorrowful Mysteries, I want to keep riding the hopeful waves of discovery and fresh awareness of Joy, or rush to rise up from the grave on the day of Glory and shout I’m Back! Some days I dread the shadows in the valleys of Sorrow.

Yet the days roll onward inexorably, reminding me how the shadows bring definition to the sunshine of joy, how the glory lingers all through the cycle, to offer the hope of comfort on the most sorrowful of days.

And so today I leap into the joyful sunlight, remembering that I am Alive! Knowing I have work to do. And deeply aware that sorrow will always cycle back to find me, even when my soul clenches with the thought of it.

And what if the Soul has trouble catching up, caught in the sloughs of the sorrowful path? When I get stuck in sorrow as I am today, resisting the glory—I gather my tools. I crowd-source ideas from friends on social media (“What do you do when you feel this way?”), I take a little longer at my morning grounding, sigh between Hail Marys, count the shades of red on the hillside, remember my dreams.

In last night’s dream, I was nursing other people’s starving babies, though I am in my time of croning. I felt the latch, felt the milk drop, felt the satisfaction that this one—at this moment—would be provided for.

Instead of answering how I can step from the shadowed pathway of the sorrow-road into the glorious light of rebirth, my dream asks me what sustenance I can find within myself to offer outward. Instead of always asking how I will be sustained to make the journey out of the tomb, today I am being asked to find that sustenance within myself and offer it outward. I do not know yet what form this will take. 

We are complex organisms, we humans, and we can carry within us simultaneously the joy and the sorrow, the tragedy and the glory. Open the bowl of your heart ever wider to take it all in.

Wake up! A new day is dawning! Be ready for the task of building a new world. The sorrows will always be with us. There will always be another child needing sustenance and protection, another soul to care for. And just as surely will the work of awakening be arriving on the train of the coming day, followed by the promise of fresh surprises on the horizon.

What wakes you up today and makes your senses come alive?

What draws your spirit from the shadowy valleys and underground passages of sorrow into the light of a new day?

What glory can you pass along, like a life-line, to your neighbors today?